That confidence, however, has a flip side. In the past, he has been equally quick to throw sharp barbs at the West.
“Some foreigners with full bellies and nothing better to do engage in finger-pointing at us,” he told a group of Chinese expatriates in Mexico in 2009. “First, China does not export revolution; second, it does not export famine and poverty; and third, it does not mess around with you. So what else is there to say?”
Where China invests: not much in U.S.
But in recent days leading up to this week’s visit, Xi appeared to be sounding a more conciliatory note, telling the Post in a written statement, “The vast Pacific Ocean has ample space for China and the United States. We welcome a constructive role by the United States in promoting peace, stability and prosperity in the region. We also hope that the United States will fully respect and accommodate the major interests and legitimate concerns of Asia-Pacific countries.”
And responding to recent criticisms of Chinese economic policies, including strict control of its exchange rate, Xi also said, “China and the United States have become highly interdependent economically. Such economic relations would not enjoy sustained, rapid growth if they were not based on mutual benefit or if they failed to deliver great benefits to the United States.”
Xi ascended through the ruling Communist Party’s elite circles as a “princeling” — part of a new generation of Chinese leaders whose parents were high-level revolutionary party members. Today, such rhetoric in many ways appeals to a rising sense of Chinese nationalism.
That consciousness is likely to exert a consistent force during Xi’s U.S. visit, as he is expected to show his audience back home that he can represent his country with confidence and authority, said Robert Kuhn, an author, adviser and confidant to China’s senior leadership.
A trip to Iowa, for example, where Xi will reconnect with former hosts from his 1985 trip, is intended to show “he knows how to reach out to the American people and that he is a man of the people,” said Kuhn, who has discussed the trip with Xi’s aides. A later stop in Los Angeles is meant to highlight Xi’s business acumen, while a rumored appearance at a Lakers basketball game is designed to show he has personality.
Much of the visit intentionally mirrors the one made in 2002 by Hu, just before he assumed China’s presidency from Jiang Zemin.
The careful choreography in many ways shows how dramatically Chinese leadership has changed since the days of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Today, the country is ruled through consensus by nine members of the Communist Party’s all-powerful Standing Committee. The title of president is mostly a foreign construction for a role more aptly described as first among equals.
Xi’s rise to the top, however, was not preordained. When he was a teenager, he and his family suffered under some of China’s harshest policies. In an interview with The Washington Post in 1992, while Xi was a party secretary in Fuzhou, he described being locked up at age 15 for the alleged crimes of his father, Xi Zhongxun, who was purged and accused of disloyalty by Mao in 1962. Xi endured daily “struggle sessions” during which he was forced to denounce his father. He spent seven years laboring in the countryside.
Although he was later restored to power, the elder Xi fell from favor again for expressing sympathy with students protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989, a little-mentioned fact in his son’s official biographies.
In a 2003 interview on the state-run CCTV, the younger Xi reflected on his turbulent youth, saying, “When the ideals of the Cultural Revolution could not be realized, it proved an illusion.”
Vice President Biden, who will act as Xi’s official host this week, said Xi has been similarly candid with him about China’s present and future.
“He genuinely is open about the nature and extent of their problems,” Biden told reporters after a visit to China in August, “what they’re going to have to deal with, short-term and long-term.”
Such problems, however, are likely to be put on the back burner for this week’s trip, during which the main focus for the Chinese will be burnishing Xi’s image.
Highlighting just how crucial the U.S. trip is to Xi’s slow-moving coronation over the next year, American organizers at each stop say their Chinese counterparts have been negotiating each detail with an insistence and thoroughness that borders on paranoia.
“The key thing is to not make any mistakes,” said Green, who helped the White House plan Hu’s trip to Washington a decade ago. “He just has to go through the ritual and survive it.”
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